Book Reviews: Good for Travel – Peter Abrahams Collection

Peter Abraham’s Collection Recommended by Stephen King

Yes, I just told you that my goals are to use Always Write for my book reviews and this blog for traveling. Because there are book reviews here already, I am going to repurpose some the posts from time to time.

Here’s my logic to how this relates to travel.

If you’re going on a trip, you need some books to read. Don’t blame me for recommending these books. Steven King included his favorite books in his book On Writing.

After I had read Steven King’s On Writing, I thumbed through his suggested reading list at the end of the book. Granted he published his book ten years ago, so these are classics. Probably voracious readers have already heard of Peter Abrahams, but I started at the top of the alphabetized list, so I started reading his books. He does what I haven’t even come close to mastering. He writes descriptions, metaphors newer and fresher than clean socks, similes as puzzling as a Sudoku, which I never work out correctly no matter how much scratching I do along the sides.

Lights Out – Peter Abrahams

In Lights Out Abrahams chose a wrongfully imprisoned, vengeful murderer as the hero. This poor man’s mother neglected him. His older brother set him up, lied to him and abandoned him, leaving “Nails” to serve his entire sentence in prison for something he never did. Of course, he killed a few bad guys in jail that picked on him, which kept him locked up. When he eventually emerged, looking younger and more fit than his outside colleagues, he searched for his brother. Nails seemed dumb, but you had a feeling he would solve the mystery of why he went to prison, and get the sexy woman in the end. You wondered if his brother would get caught, and by whom. He did, but not in any way I would have expected or chosen to read, for that matter, but it kept me reading. No matter what he did, Nails’ brother got an appropriate comeuppance, but not one you’d wish on your worst enemy.

Revolution #9-Peter-Abrahams

Revolution #9, published in 1992, told the classic story of a smart woman marrying a man she thought she knew and finding out on her wedding night that she didn’t even know his name, nor the people who came and took him away. The government thought they could close the twenty-year-old murder case when a counterfeiter blew Charlie’s cover in return for favors he would soon need again. No one had reacted with more surprise than Charlie when the bomb he had built and set under the building exploded, killing the eleven-year-old son of a professor at his college.

Running for his life, abandoned by the real terrorists, Charlie changed his identity and took cover as a lobster fisherman. He had not been discovered. Then he accidentally fell in love. When he married, news of Charlie’s reappearance twenty years later triggered many levels of events reaching into the depths of the government before the reader discovers the true perpetrators. But did they get away with it, and let Charlie live? Only those who read the book will know for sure.

My old blog with a new name. Tagline: Blogging and Traveling Near and Far

I also read Oblivion. Such a title that might have clued me into the surprise, but it didn’t. It’s unclear by the end of the book if it actually has a resolved, happy ending. It’s sort of happy, but because of the oblivious, I’m not sure.

Petrov is an investigator who wins court cases for his clients. He’s dramatic and thorough, attacking each case with the tenacity of the locked door on my front loading washer. (That’s another story.) Somehow along the way, he loses his way, and ends up in the hospital, falls in love with the nurse, and ends up head to head against his past and another love. Abrahams packs more surprises into each chapter than I have had in my life. If you read it long ago, you may have forgotten all the turns and twists, but I doubt it.

If you haven’t read this trio of mysteries, treat yourself a few days of good reading this summer. 🙂 What are you reading?

My old blog with a new name. Tagline: Blogging and Traveling Near and Far

These stories all sound quite intriguing Marsha. I must look them up on my Kindle. At the moment I’m reading a book I was given as a birthday gift a couple of years ago. It’s a biography of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother…also very interesting. It is called The Last Edwardian Lady. The social etiquette of the era would leave people scratching their heads these days.